Java and any kernel post 1063_FC4

[Kyrre Ness Sjobak]

tir, 15.02.2005 kl. 07.34 skrev Wes Shull:
> Ok, following up on this, I dropped in a new video card this weekend
> (generic Radeon 7000), and my system crashes have gone away.  So the
> video card was indeed the culprit, must have been locking the PCI bus
> or something.
> 
> Now I can leave mplayer looping overnight or run folding at home without
> any problems.  However...
> 
> With the latest rawhide kernels, I still can't run azureus for very
> long.  Not a crash, but the OOM killer seems to take it (and other
> things) out abnormally early.  The thing is, it happens in situations
> where, near as I can tell, I'm not that low on memory.  I do have only
> 256 MB RAM, and the kernel slab debug is using a lot of memory as I
> documented in an earlier post to fedora-devel-list, but it seems like
> the swap (and I've got 512 MB of it) has hardly been touched when this
> happens.  I am running with vm.swappiness=0, but that's supposed to
> just keep it from swapping until it *has* to, not stop swapping
> altogether (and it isn't).
> 
> Actually, I just had the OOM killer take out firefox while I was
> bugzilla'ing something else  :(  Here's what it has to say for itself.
>  This is under kernel-2.6.10-1.1141_FC4(.i686):
> 
> http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~wes/oom-sucks.txt

Yeah, the OOM is "a bit" rash and stupid. I had a pc which i sent a 25
pages pdf (or was it ps) document to the printer - which was controlled
by gimp-print.

Needless to say, the system ran out of its 128 MB's of RAM in about 2
secounds, trashing the harddrive for about 10 minutes, killing off about
*everything* (including gnome dock etc.) - *EXEPT* the wild goose gs
(ghostscrip) prosess eating 100 MB's of RAM and 500 MB's of swap.
I eventually resorted to the power-cutting method of killing the
process...

When speaking of videocards and instability - i had a Vodoo PCI card
which had the bad habbit of suddenly resetting itself without warning. I
cant forget the first time it happened - i was showing some techy Linux
for about the first time. I was really, really impressed, and i was just
coming around to "stability". Then it happened. The monitor (i have 10
kg's of glass and vacum sitting on my desktop, its a shame the vacum
dosn't lift the monitor more...) made a *click*, and went to black with
rolling stripes on the screen. I thing about the only open app was
evolution...

The pc didn't actually *crash* - it just locked up the PCI bus or
something. At least it seemed like it was probing for HW all the time -
the floppy/cdrom blinked (just as it does when inserting a usb mass
storage device, and hotplug loads the mass storage driver) constantly -
and the switch told a tale of loosing the network connection every 10
secounds... Anyway, i was able to ssh in, and restart the machine.

this was during fc1, i.e. the Linux 2.4 days.

Kyrre